"Come on, Rumbo, let a man get inside his own home," I said to the squirrel, gently easing him aside with one foot. He found my shoelace tasty.
I reached for my key, but decided to test the door first. As I'd half expected, Midge hadn't locked up after her despite my warnings. We were no longer in the big bad city, she always rebuked me.
I pushed open the door and Rumbo scampered in before me. It was very gloomy inside and I had a nasty vision of a rotting corpse sitting at the kitchen table swinging around to greet me with a lipless grin. Oh Stringer, you've gotta forget the vicar's little tale!
"Midge! You around?" I dumped the guitar cases on the floor and went to the foot of the stairs. "Midge? The hunk's home!"
She was definitely out. The place was so quiet it was loud.
Disappointed, I went through to the adjoining room and filled the kettle. Rumbo had preceded me and was darting backward and forward along the top of the old iron range.
"Don't go up that chimney," I advised him. "You'll come down so black your own family wouldn't recognize you. And I hear you red squirrels have had enough trouble from the grays—so imagine what would happen if a black squirrel showed up in the neighborhood."
Rumbo looked up into what must have been to him the equivalent of a lift shaft, and accepted my advice (maybe he knew something about racialism), hopping off the range, then over to the fridge-freezer, leaping onto its top. From there, he gnashed his tiny teeth at me.
"Okay, feller, I know what you're after." Reaching up to a shelf behind me, I took down the biscuit jar and unscrewed the lid. "One for you, one for me." I tossed over a piece which he deftly caught in his paws and immediately munched into. Mine was gone in two bites, but his took considerably longer; he daintily gnawed around the edge, turning the shrinking biscuit in his paws and occasionally glancing my way, presumably to check if any more were in the offing. He was a fascinating little tyke all right, lovably cheeky (we'd once found him snugly asleep in our bed, burrowed down beneath the sheets) although sometimes irascible (he'd thrown bacon rind down at my head one morning from the top of the sideboard after I'd scolded him for running across the kitchen table and knocking over the sugar bowl). A month or so ago I would never have believed an animal could be so tame—at least, not a wild squirrel—or so smart (he always knew when breakfast or lunch was about to be served, rarely failing to make an appearance at those times—he enjoyed our scraps more than regular squirrel food, I think).
Steam billowed from the kettle and I spooned instant coffee into a cup, adding one sugar, and milk this time. Pouring the boiling water made me nervous and, not for the first time since Sunday, perplexed. You were lucky, is all, I told myself, lucky your arm got dipped in the Synergists' own special brand of Fairy Liquid so soon after the accident. They could market the formula for a million. No, several millions. But they'd have to cut out the holding-hands-voodoo bit if they wanted to be taken seriously.
Antiseptic only—huh! Who did Kinsella think he was kidding?
I sipped coffee, burning my lips. Maybe they already did market the green curative, only in discreet quantities—under the counter, as it were. That would explain how they could afford such a large estate as Croughton Hall. Their secretiveness didn't make much sense, but then if they were some kind of nutty religious sect, it didn't need to. Interesting, though.
I left the kitchen, taking the cup of coffee with me, Rumbo racing ahead up the stairs, the last of the biscuit hastily devoured. The whole place was unusually dull and gray, the sun's absence making quite a contrasting impression on the atmosphere of the place. Long, rainy winter days were obviously going to prove a trial for both of us. Still, weren't they always, wherever you lived? I went straight from the hall into the bedroom—did I mention we'd moved into the bigger room by now, the one that had had the crack in the wall repaired and painted over?—-just in case Midge had fallen asleep in there. I ordered Rumbo off the empty-of-Midge bed where he was having a fine time tangled up in the top sheet, and went through to the round room. Even in here, with the three large windows, it was gloomy. The smell of paint hung in the air and, because it was a familiar scent and one I associated with my live-in partner, it wasn't unpleasant. Her drawing board was sloped at an acute angle, and I remembered she had told me she'd spent yesterday painting. Now, every new illustration from Midge was a delight to me (not to mention to all her fans, young and old) and I lost no time in getting across the room to see.
One thing I did before peeking, though, was to lay down my coffee on the small table beside the swivel-board where she kept her paints, brushes, and bits and pieces. Our rule was that I never went near her artwork—nor was anyone else allowed to—with dangerous substances in my hand. I made the mistake once, when we were only just getting to know one another, of opening a can of beer while admiring her work at close range; you can guess where the spray went. Midge had taken it well, but I resolved "never again."
Only when the cup was safely out of my hands did I turn and look. And was instantly lost in pure, worshipful awe of her talent.
The painting, in her favorite medium of designer's gouache, was of Gramarye itself.
She had obviously worked from the grass shoulder outside the garden gate, using her small easel to support the artboard, because the cottage was viewed from there, the garden, with its wild patterns of colors, in the foreground. The forest behind provided a strangely brooding backdrop, albeit insignificant against the exuberance of Gramarye itself, the walls brilliantly white, yet detailed, marked where the real walls were marked, worn where the real brickwork was worn. The colors may have been exaggerated—no roof could ever be quite that shade of rusty red, the grass and nearest trees could never be that vividly green—yet they conveyed the true vibrancy of our home and its surroundings, the invigorating quality we had both felt when we first moved in, but which only Midge, with her unique and skillful, child's-view artistry could express. You know, my knees actually went weak as I took it all in.
But that was nothing compared with what was to come.
Outside, the sun broke through the clouds, washing the room with a sudden brilliant warmth, striking those lucid colors before me so that they dazzled and surged, yes, surged, with sparkling energy, the brightness striking into me, deep into me, and reproducing—not just duplicating— the image inside my head, as if it had solidified in there, was as real as the original.
Remember that first day Midge and I had come to look at the cottage, when I thought I'd gone into some kind of delayed drug excursion? Well, this was it again. Either I started swaying or the artboard started moving, because the picture kept dancing in and out of focus.
The sun behind me blazed on my shoulders and the top of my head felt so hot I wondered if it were on fire. I could feel myself going, my knees sagging, the picture captured inside my head swelling, becoming too immense to contain, threatening to expand through my brain and push against the inner walls of my skull. The pressure was almost unbearable.
In some kind of fantastic and frightening way, I became part of Midge's picture, living and breathing in it just as surely as if I were outside standing before the garden gate; only whether I was truly inside the picture or the picture was inside me, I had no way of knowing. The smell of fresh paint was slight, but the smell of flowers, of grass, offence, of road—of sky!—was intoxicating. I was hallucinating and I was totally aware that I was doing so. But nothing, no effort of will could bring me back. I'm sure I cried out, because I was scared, Jesus, I was so scared!